Tango

I would say that the creators need to learn the lesson that GOT teaches: that audiences appreciate greater complexity and a show that doesn’t talk down to them… but then I feel like if they did try to emulate GOT, they’d just assume the lesson is that audiences want grimdark, and they’d make Discovery again.

It’s not explicitly stated, but the obvious implication is that this was the only time Kirk met Pike.

Fortunately, there’s just enough wiggle room to accept the alternate explanation that Kirk is saying “I’ve known him since his promotion to Fleet Captain”.

The other slightly odd bit of mild discontinuity is that half of the main TOS characters in The Menagerie Part I (Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty) know Captain Pike very very well, but none of them aside from Spock act like they do, nor do they display any dismay at discovering what’s happened to their dear former captain (which Kirk only learns on visiting the base). Spock evidently has known for some time; long enough to have concocted his scheme and write the necessary route into a computer auto-navigation program, at least. But it’s not clear whether anyone else found out before the episode. In any case, there isn’t enough dialogue for these other characters in the episode to draw any concrete conclusions either way.

The show definitely wants us to consider it a possibility that the reason La’An isn’t on the Enterprise in TOS is because she died. However, we also don’t know why Una isn’t on the Enterprise in TOS. For Una, I’d consider the most likely explanation to be that she got promoted and now commands her own ship. In such a scenario, it could just as easily be that she took La’An with her as her first officer. In that case, Kirk being sad at the mention of La’An’s name could be that they broke up and he took it badly. But we just don’t know.

I do consider it to be quite likely that they’ll stick with Ortegas leaving to become a flight instructor, especially as that was shown to be the case BEFORE Future Uhura’s time displacement.

Remember, the Kirk that was talking about her like that was also the Kirk for whom Scotty had died a year ago. By changing that, it’s entirely possible that Uhura changed whatever Kirk was avoiding talking about. Therefore nothing is certain.

So we’re definitely getting a season 2, then? Last time I checked, it was still being negotiated

Yeah, now that you mention it, it would have made a lot more sense if Hysperia and Elysian were the same place.

If Caster had been there, it probably would have become an Uhura episode.

Sure but in DS9 Kor is by far the goofiest of the three musketeers Dahar masters. Kang is far more serious and a better fit for this character, and even looks more like Demore Barnes. So making him Kor instead is an odd decision.

I think the main goal of the Maquis was not to evoke sympathy for them, but to put the main characters in interesting moral/ethical quandaries. Both TNG and DS9 did “forced relocation” episodes where the narrative focus was on the fact that there were no “right” answers, only “less wrong” ones.

In that sense, it’s like the Kobayashi Maru: the main characters are presented with a no-win scenario and the purpose of the episode is that watching how they deal with that tells us more about who these characters are and what they stand for. Kira’s episode certainly helped define her character, especially when Sisko summed it up for her: she was used to fighting for the underdog, but she was on the other side now.